ArticleExpertise

Tracing ethnography: A
performance approach to the ethnographer’s dis/appearance.

This lecture is
informed by the epistemology of “traces,” which,
according to Jacques Derrida and Susan Stewart, function as material
links that connect contexts and allow situated meanings to be
performed and grasped. The lecture employs reflexive methods with the
aim of critically examining the production of academic knowledge.
Empirically, the focus is on an ethnography conducted in a national
memorial museum located in Jerusalem. The ethnography explored
commemorative discourse and representations thereof, as these are
embodied in the museum’s visitor book and in the writing
practices that it enables. In the ethnography, the visitor book was
conceptualized performatively, suggesting it is not a linguistic or
thematic corpus that should be analyzed, but a situated stage on
which multimodal performances are accomplished by the visitors (Noy,
2008a, 2008b).

But within the economy
of museums’ exhibits and performances, research itself is
implicated by the semiotics of performance and commemoration. While
the ethnography sought visitors’ and tourists’ traces on
the pages of the visitor book, its material—observable and
public—presence at the site, had created it own effects; its
own traces. Ethnographic practice is thus deconstructed with the aim
of shedding light on how in-situ research is itself an ideological
and aesthetic move. Ethnography is n the put on the same footing as
museum visitorship, i.e. as situated, performative accomplishments.
In line with the conference’s Deleuzian
theme, the lecture concludes by suggesting that performance
(experimentation) and not interpretation is the leading semiotic
resource is late-modernity.

Noy, C. (2008a). 'Mediation Materialized: The Semiotics of a Visitor
Book at an Israeli Commemoration Site', Critical Studies in Media
Communication, 25(2), 175-195.

----. (2008b). 'Pages as Stages: A Performance Approach to Visitor
Books', Annals of Tourism Research, 35(2), 509-528.

Tracing
ethnography

Scene
one: Being There

The expression Being
There conveys a performative rendering of my ethnographic research in
the Ammunition Hill museum. This the expression accomplishes via its
twofold designation. The term "being" touches on an
existential notion of existence and presence; a Heideggerian being in
the world or Dasein. This being in ethnographic research concerns the
meanings and implications of being some-where, being within physical
and semiotic confines of places, in the present case of a
commemorative museum.

The term "there"
compliments the notion of being and suggests a particular site in
which being occurs (literally dasein means "being there").
This is true for all beings in the world, and specifically
complicated fro ethnographic inquiry, which is always situated and
always has a field" or "site" of research. This is in
fact the very definition of ethnographic research, a research of
being—observing, recording, interviewing, participating and
other social activities that take place—"there,"
wherever that this "there" may be. Note that in situated
research practices such as ethnography, there are always references
to specific places, and with them always indexical references that
reveal the relationship between the researcher and the field or the
site. "Here" or "there" are common indexical
terms used to describe the distance between the field and the
homeplace (there), or alternatively proximity (here). As I suggested
earlier, in this article I pursue my ethnography in a similar and
parallel manner to that which I pursued performative entries in the
VB. The indexical deictics "here" and "there"
relate to how visitors who inscribe the visitor book accomplish the
task of producing entries performatively. This is necessarily done
through a deictic anchoring of the performance in the space/on the
stage whereat it is revealed as a meaningful and aesthetisized social
action.

Scene
Two: Collector: Totalizer

-- Stewart (1993,
p.161), "It is the museum, not the library, which must serve as
the central metaphor of the collection … [because it is there
that] closure of all space and temporality within the context at
hand" occurs.

In this section I shall
briefly argue for another parallel or in terms of power relations
another competition, between the semiotics of the museum and those of
the ethnography. This parallel is evinced in the intuitions'—museums
on the one hand and ethnography on the other, to sample and collect
artifacts (broadly defined), and by and by also to
re/de-contextualize their meanings.

Scene
Three: Ideologies of representation

Finally, in scene
number three I wish to complete the circle that describes the power
(inter)relations between museumal and ethnographic semiotics, by
arguing that both agencies essentially employ means of
representation, and that these means convey ideologies of
representation which have both similarities and differences.